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Author Responds to "gdm Murdered Mysteriously"

Sorry about the delay. I've been attending Linux Kongress the past
week.

The fact that the version of GNOME gdm that shipped with Red Hat
6.x can't gracefully handle (clean up after) an inadvertant
shutdown or other mishap is very disappointing.

Well, contrary to common belief X display management isn't trivial at
all. Since gdm is a complete redesign/rewrite of xdm, it is bound to
have problems. I have never tried to conceal the fact that gdm has
issues. It even says so on the web page.

That being said, gdm works ok for local display management, provided
the X server is relatively well behaved (i.e. not buggy).

The fact that the version of GNOME gdm that shipped with Red Hat
6.x can't gracefully handle (clean up after) an inadvertant
shutdown

Yes it can. You're speculating.

I find it disappointing that a person like you, who has been in the
Linux business for several years, resorts to spreading FUD. Don't
answer questions, if you don't know the answer.

The right answer here, like in 99% of all other cases concerning
system daemons, would be to consult the syslog.

I believe I did consult the syslogs. I
remember that I did have to remove some sort of
lock file or something before I could get gdm working
again (but I don't remember the details).

I did NOT see this question listed in their FAQ (which surprises
me, since I would think that this would be a very commonly
encountered problem among RH6/GNOME users).
However, I did find a link to a bug tracking system. From there I
searched for messages related to our "murdered mysteriously"
problem. There was some indication that Martin K. Petersen is
the contact for gdm and that he posted patches to resolve that
(and several other) gdm issues.

The "murdered mysteriously" message is a non-critical warning, not a
failure. Thus it hasn't and never will be "fixed". Neither have I
posted any patches to resolve it.

The message indicates that something killed the master gdm process or
something left Xlib in a state which it couldn't handle gracefully.
I.e. gdm was forced to about without cleaning up. However, this
doesn't affect subsequent startups in any way.

/Martin

This suggests that a simple [Ctrl][Alt][BackSpace] or
a 'telinit q' command should restore 'gdm' to functioning.
Or is there some sort of state preserved by Xlib
in the filesystem?

I'm sorry if my message offended you. I was frustrated
when I first encounted this error message (in front of a
class full of new Linux students, in fact) and I seem to
recall that the problem persisted through a reboot, and
required some fussing with lockfiles or unix domain socket
entries, or something.

I was also frustrated when I got the question for my
column.

Since I don't run GNOME on my home systems or my workstation
I don't have an easy way to attempt to reproduce the problem
myself. The user didn't provide me with much info either.

(Thus I am forced to speculate: frequently and for many of
my answers. I try to let people know when I'm guessing
and when I'm speaking from first hand experience. Sometimes
I fail).

I have seen Red Hat 6.0 systems FAIL to bring up gdm
in a persistent way. I've seen the message "gdm murdered
mysteriously" associated with this failure. It might not
be a failure of gdm's --- but the gdm error message is
certainly occurring at about the same time.

Anyway, hopefully GNOME will be more stable in Red Hat 6.2
or 6.3. Overall I think Red Hat Inc has been pushing it
on to too many desktops a little too quickly.